Takeshi Kitano's FIREWORKS (aka Hana-Bi)

A question that I dont think I see ever pondered much less asked in a Yakuza vs Cops crime film: How does one find some semblance of inner peace and a re-connection with oneself, or the world at large, after a horrifically violent, traumatic near-killing? There are passages here where a paralyzed gun-shot victim stares at paintings of some surreal and odd looking flowers, and Kitano shows us these flowers.

Who else would do this?  Or have the ending this has on the beach where it leaves on a sense that life is going to continue... or end... or something.... I won't spoil it.

Fireworks is marked not by what it is about but entirely the idiosyncratic way the director goes about it, hie we see his character and those around him grapple with the aftermath of a profound act of violence. Some films about the Yakuza and the police and crime from Japan will grapple with more deeply-felt, even spiritual dimensions of what violence does to people and the mind and body, but it's a small handful relatively. Kitano means to ask what violence does to people in ways that so many films will brush off, even as (also part of his daring) he is still showing some very uncanny bits of situational and off-beat comedy.

Sometimes this even reminds me of Kaurismaki as far as how deadpan the timing can be with Nishii (Kitano) and what he goes through in his encounters and counter-measures against gangsters as a forced-to-retire cop (he didn't stop a guy from killing one partner and paralyzing another), and that this is mixed with the story of the paralyzed cop and his own malaise and sadness and how he slowly finds things like art and flowers to get him into if not out of it than an awareness of the world he's in, that's special to see. (And then learning from some reviews that the painting were actually by Kitano himself, and that he went through his own existential crisis, that adds even more to the pathos).

My main takeaway is Kitano is one of the major Smugglers of his generation and especially in Japanese cinema; it's not that he doesn't give an audience that thinks they will see will involve some bad guys shooting at cops and cops shooting back and that blood and bullets will fly and punches will land and make damage and so forth, and that Kitano will fight back when provoked too far (though how he shows that matters too, and how he adds this visceral kick to every time we see a gun go off, often for how long a pause will be on a reaction, or how the edits with a gunshot are not John Woo operatic but more like... how awkward and fucked up it is when someone is shot in reality).

It's that he goes deeper with what he is showing on the edges of the story, with the paralyzed cop (I will forever remember this for the shot where he is just sitting at the edge of the ocean as the waves go up against his feet over and over while he just sits there in a daze), and also with Nishi's sick wife (Kishimoto has a subtlety that is really sweet and charming as well). There's a section of this story where we are seeing Nishi and his wife going around and just visiting sights and seeing nature and beauty.

This could be the part of the film one might criticize that it "drags," but then again compared to what? The film has this tone set from the beginning as being completely of its own, like being in the sort of poetic dream of a gangster movie, that when it takes diversions it feels all the more human and touching (even once or twice kind of cute like when the wife falls into the snow) compared to the blood and splatter.

Oh, and did I mention Joe Hisaishi's score? Holy Cow. I know his work from Miyazaki's films, but this is so lush, so encompassing a sadness and melancholy and this feeling even of trying for something more (notice how the music comes up when the man in the wheelchair makes that drawing of the girl with umbrella... what a perfect little moment in modern movies). I should mark this as a minor criticism as well, as if the music is doing a lot of the heavy-lifting for the pathos... but this is one of the great scores of the 1990s, and this was the very same year he composed Princess Mononoke, so, yeah, amazing.

The longer this went on the more I loved it, not even for its story which is not even thin as just straightforward if you were to lay it out as far as events or facts on paper but for the feeling of reality given to the characters we like (Nishi, his wife, his ex partner, who by the way is painting and drawing because Nishi sent him supplies) and that we almost laugh when Kitano uses the violent moves he does because of how used to the rhythm we become. Fireworks isn't a film to watch for kinetic thrills but for how it opens up why it's important to... keep on living.